Meredith’s track and positions through 15 October 1942 derived from CNO Action Report.

“It now appears that we are unable to control the sea in the Guadalcanal area. Thus our supply of the positions will only be done at great expense to us. The situation is not hopeless but it is certainly critical,” said Adm. Nimitz, 15 October 1942. Japanese naval resources were stronger than those available to ComSoPac Adm. Robert L. Ghormley and they saw an opportunity to finish the campaign by bombarding Marines defending Guadalcanal’s Henderson Field and then overwhelming them with newly-landed troops.

A first step was bombardment. At the Battle of Cape Esperance, 11–12 October, an American cruiser-destroyer task force turned back a Japanese bombardment group at the cost of Duncan, but that success was short lived. Unopposed on the night of 13–14 October, battleships Kongo and Haruna delivered 80 minutes of shelling, remembered thereafter as “The Bombardment,” with more of the same the next night from cruisers Chokai and Kinugasa, eliminating the Marines’ supply of aviation gasoline.

Desperate to get planes back in the air to defend themselves, the Marines depended on the Navy to get supplies through. Departing Espiritu Santo on 12 October, was Task Unit 62.4.5, cargo ships Bellatrix and Alchiba, each towing a barge, plus tender Jamestown, tug Vireo and Meredith, limited by the barges to 7 knots and therefore due to arrive only on the 16th. Departing later was destroyer-seaplane-tender McFarland (AVD 14), which did make it that day.

Meredith‘s convoy survived but Meredith did not, sacrificed on the 15th under circumstances as extreme as faced by any destroyer in the entire war—the primary “expense” of which Admiral Nimitz had warned earlier that day.

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In 1990, Meredith Chief Quartermaster and reunion organizer Robby Robinson collected records and accounts and published them as Shipmates Forever. His sources reflect diligent research conducted over many decades. The timeline below is prepared from them plus a summary entitled The Short Life of a Valiant Ship, USS Meredith (DD 434), prepared with Lcdr Robinson by Barry Friedman M.D., the two having served together later in World War II in Russell.

To these records and accounts we now add plots of reported positions using digital mapping. The result is presented in the table below and in the accompanying charts.